With a battle-tested pedigree of 25 years of development and thousands of productions, Fusion 7’s features are more than the continued sum of their parts. With core updates that have significantly increased speed and efficiencies, Fusion 7's design of 2D tools in a 3D system has achieved a highly-productive VFX environment.

"What continues to amaze me is how much has been invested in making Fusion 7 faster and more intuitive," says VFX/animation supervisor Vadim Turchin. "With CG being such an essential part of compositing workflows, Fusion 7 solves major lighting and shading problems, opening infinite possibilities for an artist."

Fusion 7 Key Features

Fusion 7’s 3D system and renderer import geometry from FBX and Alembic, as well as OBJ, 3DS, and Collada. Millions of polygons, complex Shaders, Ambient Occlusion, Deep Volumetric Atmospherics, Particles Systems, and other toolsets, are now all final rendered with advanced optimization for GPUs, benchmarking in seconds instead of hours.

Fusion 7 offers the ability to have multiple 3D renderers all in one project, all integrated and rendering different aspects from the same scene. Generating Deep Passes, such as World Position, Normals, UV, and Velocity, with Fusion’s flexibility to combine 3D and 2D in a single workflow, is a significant demarcation point from other applications.

Productivity and workflow are streamlined further with automation tools and enhanced rendering. Fusion 7’s built-in Render Manager, and the Scripting engine that supports Python 2.x and 3.x, and Lua, are supported with scripts that ship as part of Fusion 7.

Developing Macro tools, managing and sharing tools, jobs, and footage, are now part of Fusion 7’s design for studio-wide use via the integrated Bin System.

Fusion can have multiple projects open at the same time, with cut and paste abilities between comps adding to the integrated environment design. It is now a matter of seconds to test one comp while rendering another. The Integrated Script Debug Console works for Python and Lua to step through code, set breakpoints, and have multiple scripts open at the same time.

Just-In-Time Compiling for Fuses and OpenCL tools gives the ability to develop sophisticated tools without having a C++ development environment. Immediately compile and use these tools while working in the Fusion comp. These are multithreaded for speed, and OpenCL is GPU accelerated.

“I love this software! It is literally like I can think of anything and Fusion will allow me to do it,” says Leon Liebenberg, CVC Media.

“Fusion 7 is a testimony to a great dev team," says Jeff Krebs, eyeon's Director of Technical Sales. "When you see how this level of architectural updating impacts your creativity (and budgets!), it will be our pleasure to show you just what else is possible!"

Fusion 7 Updates and Enhancements

Animation Indicators

Drag and Drop Layout

User Interface Templates

Learning Environment

Multi Projects/Documents

Connected Node Position and Prediction

Templates

Native Camera Support

Screen Space Ambient Occlusion

3D Custom Vertex

Alembic Import

Latest FBX Library

Replace Normals 3D

3D Interactive Splines

3D Ribbon

UV Render and Super Sampling

3D Text Bevel Shaper

Dimension - Optical Flow and Stereoscopic Tools

Just-In-time Compiling

Script Development Interface

Linear Light Color/Open Color IO

Deep Volume Processing

Roto Onion Skinning

Source: eyeon

Jennifer Wolfe is Director of News & Content at Animation World Network.